On a sultry Minnesota summer morning, I sit on my front porch with a container full of fresh peas purchased at the Farmers' Market, a colander, and a trash bag.It will take me an entire hour to shell the peas netting just twocups worth of little green gems for almost an hour of work.I had hoped to find shelled peas at one of the stalls this morning, but today it was enough work for the farmers to pick the peas and bring them to market. It's the buyer's job to take the process further.
I'm doing my pea shelling alone and once I develop a rhythm, my mind can wander.Almost as soon as I began to pull the string on the first pea pod, I am lodged firmly in Mississippi fifty-six years ago on an even more sultry Friday morning in July. I visualize my Baubie (great-grandmother) and my grandma seated side by side on the patio of my grandparents' home in Tupelo shelling peas for Shabbat dinner. Baubie and Grandma chattered while their hands flew. Since they spoke Yiddish, I understood only a few random words.I wondered how they could be enjoying themselves seated on metal chairs preparing vegetables.I preferred the air conditioning.
Now that I see the scene, I am struck by my Baubie's curved hands.She must have suffered from arthritis.My hands ache as I pull peapods open and I'm almost 20 years younger than she was on that morning.Her hands were always on the move-- cooking and baking or crotcheting.I can even remember how she touched my cheek with her fingertips each morning. She was just my size and that accident of height drew me close to her.I loved watching her unbraid her long gray hair, wrap it in a bun each morning and carefully place the hairpins.I imagine she had been plaiting her hair and arranging a bun daily for over sixty years by the time I knew her.
At the age of nine, I didn't consider what my Baubie or grandma thought about their lives.Now I would ply them both with questions asking what it felt like for Baubie to be shut off from the American world that spun around on its English axis.She always looked like an anachronism.I wonder if she ever gave that a thought.Did she think about the horrors that she escaped by immigrating from Russia before the Great War?Did she enjoy her life?Did she have friends of her own?Did she miss her sisters who, like Baubie, lived with their daughters scattered across the United States.
Writing Jewish Luck and following the lives of two Russian Jewish families that remained past the Russian Revolution, survived the Civil War, Stalin's purges, the Great Patriotic War, and more purges was a way to answer what could have happened had Baubie not left Russia with her three children?What kind of a life would they have had?
Baubie died during Sukkot while she was with her daughter Ruth and her family.
She simply closed her eyes. It happened right after the summer I spent with my grandparents and Baubie in Tupelo. I regretted never having a conversation with Baubie I thought of our physical contact—the touch on my cheek or a hug, the feel of her very deeply wrinkled face when I kissed her. Her scent was cinnamon and sugar and dough. When Baubie died, it was the first time I had ever heard my parents utter the words "death" and "funeral."I couldn't really imagine what it would feel like to never see Baubie again.
Now I realize I do see Baubie again and again and just the simple motion of sitting on a porch with a pea pod in my hand can bring her back to life.